World's fairs and similar exhibitions should be explored more as a topic given how much of an influence they have had on city planning, introducing new inventions and concepts, and generally serving as demonstrations of the zeitgeist of an era.
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AH Run-downs, summaries and general gubbins
- Thread starter Sideways
- Start date
The Privileges Committee is a body tasked with the oversight of access to hospitals for surgeons, consultants and specialists. Established in 1878 by the Royal College of Surgeons to grant (or refuse) requests by surgeons to be allowed the "priviledge" of using operating theatres at individual hospitals, it has since 1950 been an agency of the National Health Service, and since 1975 its role has been restricted to oversight of surgeon, consultant, and specialist distribution, deployment and numbers, but is not involved in the decisions on individual practitioners' hospital roles.
The Wild West is the popular term - used at the time in writing but mostly popularised by the penny dreadfuls decades later - for West Africa during the late 18th and early 19th century, after Britain's Slavery Abolition Act (1789) and the French Revolution occured within weeks of each other. The sudden disruption to the transatlantic slave trade and 'opening up' of French territory blew up the existing status quo. As well as being a time of exciting violence, where existing African kingdoms, rising powers, and European invaders would all fight each other, it was a time of political chaos where it seemed the lines on the maps were being rewritten every week.
After thirteen years, the period ended with most of Europe having thrown in the towel and only a few British outposts left, carrying on small trade with the new coastal nations. The myth of the Wild West would discourage any new European adventures in Africa for decades and by then, West Africa had developed through gradual trade and nobles visiting abroad and was considered too dangerous to invade.
After thirteen years, the period ended with most of Europe having thrown in the towel and only a few British outposts left, carrying on small trade with the new coastal nations. The myth of the Wild West would discourage any new European adventures in Africa for decades and by then, West Africa had developed through gradual trade and nobles visiting abroad and was considered too dangerous to invade.
- Location
- Sandford, Gloucestershire
- Pronouns
- She/They
Right, in the grand tradition of SLP I’m attempting to write a party rundown for the Solar Confederation the transhuman near-utopia of my in progress novel “Cold Morning”. If folks want more Cold Morning stuff let me know
A Summary of the State of Affairs in the Solar Confederation, 19th June, 2218
Current Members of the Executive Branch/nation of origin/nominating party
Li Chao (Empire of China, Liberal). Li Chao is six months into her time as head of the Executive Council. This Ceremonial position doesn’t help people’s perception of Li as someone who has failed upwards from the Emperor’s representative to Confed up to the council. Generally seen as Orchid’s puppet
Mary Three-Red-Diamonds (United States of America, Social Democrat): Former Mayor of chicago and then Progressive Senator for Illinois whose election caused some controversy as they are a member of the Cards, a linked consciousness of some nine thousand sophonts. She is quick to point out however on the distinction between linked and hive conciousnesses.
Sophia Holm (Kingdom of Norway, Liberal): This former Chancellor (2190-2198) is the elder statesperson of the technolibertarians at the venerable age of 140.
Alessandro Noriega (Martian Polar Republic Social Democrat): Former President of the MPR and sixth generation Martian. Lifelong supporter of Terraforming beyond Earth. Recently got in trouble for calling the head of the Neo-Trad’s Adaptionist Caucus “An Armour plated motherfucker”
Oberon-9-Sinclair (L5 Databanks, Neo-Sovereign): A confusing series of bargains have lead to a solipsist AI being one of the highest ranked people in the Solar System.
Suraj Harare (Republic of Aotearoa, Reclaim), Former head of the Reclaim Party in Parliament, recently made the news when their great great great great grandfather was successfully revived as part of the ongoing cryogenic revival project in Canada. Mr Reyansh Murthy was born in India in 1982.
Jeong Park-939 (Western Antarctica, Beyond ): Long standing member of Parliament, he is the third member of the Park collective to serve on the council.
Parties in the Confederation Parliament
Majority Parties (since 2217)
Liberal: The Liberals remain torn between its traditionalist wing and its technolibertarian wing. The Former are more at home in this government and the home of New Chancellor the Anthropomorphic AI and self described Gynoid, Elizabeth Orchid.
Reclaim: The Greens of the 23rdC Home to a mix of deep green bioprogressives, relatively primitivist humans and hardcore restorationists
Neo Sovereign: The home of most folks who stand against the Confederation project as a whole, a weird alliance of biotraditionalist humans, Adaptionists and moderate solipsist AIs.
Opposition Parties (with Council representation)
Social Democrat: The oldest party of the Confederation, the moderate face of interventionism. Workers rights, such as they matter these days, big scale engineering projects and Confederal Federalisation
Beyond: What passes for the far left in 2218. Kept in power by hive minds and old school Trancendentalists. Barely scraped a member on the council
Other Parties represented in Parliament
Uplift Rights: formerly a big player but as uplifts have become more established in society and the last holdouts of suppression have opened up most Uplifts just vote like most other sophonts. Barely scraped the 3% threshold
A Summary of the State of Affairs in the Solar Confederation, 19th June, 2218
Current Members of the Executive Branch/nation of origin/nominating party
Li Chao (Empire of China, Liberal). Li Chao is six months into her time as head of the Executive Council. This Ceremonial position doesn’t help people’s perception of Li as someone who has failed upwards from the Emperor’s representative to Confed up to the council. Generally seen as Orchid’s puppet
Mary Three-Red-Diamonds (United States of America, Social Democrat): Former Mayor of chicago and then Progressive Senator for Illinois whose election caused some controversy as they are a member of the Cards, a linked consciousness of some nine thousand sophonts. She is quick to point out however on the distinction between linked and hive conciousnesses.
Sophia Holm (Kingdom of Norway, Liberal): This former Chancellor (2190-2198) is the elder statesperson of the technolibertarians at the venerable age of 140.
Alessandro Noriega (Martian Polar Republic Social Democrat): Former President of the MPR and sixth generation Martian. Lifelong supporter of Terraforming beyond Earth. Recently got in trouble for calling the head of the Neo-Trad’s Adaptionist Caucus “An Armour plated motherfucker”
Oberon-9-Sinclair (L5 Databanks, Neo-Sovereign): A confusing series of bargains have lead to a solipsist AI being one of the highest ranked people in the Solar System.
Suraj Harare (Republic of Aotearoa, Reclaim), Former head of the Reclaim Party in Parliament, recently made the news when their great great great great grandfather was successfully revived as part of the ongoing cryogenic revival project in Canada. Mr Reyansh Murthy was born in India in 1982.
Jeong Park-939 (Western Antarctica, Beyond ): Long standing member of Parliament, he is the third member of the Park collective to serve on the council.
Parties in the Confederation Parliament
Majority Parties (since 2217)
Liberal: The Liberals remain torn between its traditionalist wing and its technolibertarian wing. The Former are more at home in this government and the home of New Chancellor the Anthropomorphic AI and self described Gynoid, Elizabeth Orchid.
Reclaim: The Greens of the 23rdC Home to a mix of deep green bioprogressives, relatively primitivist humans and hardcore restorationists
Neo Sovereign: The home of most folks who stand against the Confederation project as a whole, a weird alliance of biotraditionalist humans, Adaptionists and moderate solipsist AIs.
Opposition Parties (with Council representation)
Social Democrat: The oldest party of the Confederation, the moderate face of interventionism. Workers rights, such as they matter these days, big scale engineering projects and Confederal Federalisation
Beyond: What passes for the far left in 2218. Kept in power by hive minds and old school Trancendentalists. Barely scraped a member on the council
Other Parties represented in Parliament
Uplift Rights: formerly a big player but as uplifts have become more established in society and the last holdouts of suppression have opened up most Uplifts just vote like most other sophonts. Barely scraped the 3% threshold
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The Green Belt can refer either to the British urban planning policy or the Green Party seats in Northern England that almost cut through the region. While the party does compete for other seats, these have been more or less remained Green 'safe seats' for a generation. This began in the late 1990s after the Greens in Sheffield pivoted to arguing how eco-friendly technology was necessary and could be built in the north's ex-industrial cities & towns, "restoring jobs, restoring our communities, restoring our planet". With the Conservative Party damaged at the time, the Greens benefitted from being the best choice to 'punish' Labour for any issues and the party has clinged on ever since.
The Kier Starmer I Scream Scandal was a British politics sex scandals in mid 2023.
The scandal died down without resolution as the press turned its attention to allegations of blackmail and bribery in Boris Johnson's resignation list.
The Labour Party leader was being interviewed by Hello! and was asked what his kinkiest sexual activity was. Flustered, Starmer spluttered slightly, and then said "well, sometimes during the act, I scream." When the article came out, there were repeated attempts by the tabloid press to get comment from his spouse, and when that failed the Sun published a comment they claimed was by a colleague of Mrs Starmer, saying that she had said "that doesn't sound like Kier". For a fortnight, Starmer was repeatedly asked about his sex life, with insinuations being made that he had lied to sound more interesting.
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theflyingmgoose
Well-known member
SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC:
Founded: July 28, 1912 (By Teddy Roosevelt)
Members: 25,000,000
Political Position: Left-Wing
Ideology:
-Social Democracy
-Environmentalism
-Progressivism
-Democratic Socialism (Faction)
Youth Wing: Young Social Democrats of America
LGBT Wing: LGBT Social Democrats
TLDR: Wholesome 100 Social Democratic Party
NATIONAL FRONT:
Founded: September 15, 2002 (By Richard Spencer)
Members: 15,000,000
Political Position: Syncretic to Far-Right
Ideology:
-Pan-Westernism
-Populism
-Anti-Islam
-Environmentalism
Youth Wing: Save Our Future League
LGB Wing: Rainbow National Front
TLDR: Don't touch the gays: they are part of our western heritage populists
CONSERVATIVE UNION:
Founded: January 1, 1980 (By George H.W. Bush)
Members: 10,000,000
Political Position: Center-Right to Right-Wing
Ideology:
-Fiscal Conservatism
-Centrism
-Liberal Conservatism
Youth Wing: Young Conservatives
LGB Wing: LGB Conservatives
Milquetoast center-right Romneyites
LIBERAL PARTY:
Founded: March 21, 1960 (By John F. Kennedy)
Members: 10,000,000
Political Position: Center-Left to Center
Ideology:
-Social Liberalism
-Technocracy
-Neoliberalism
-Third Way (Faction)
Youth Wing: New Liberals
LGBT Wing: LGBT Liberals
Resistlibs and Obamna
GREEN LEAGUE:
Founded: September 16, 1965 (By Rachel Carson)
Members: 5,000,000
Political Position: Center to Far-Left
Ideology:
-Environmentalism
-Green Politics
-Social Liberalism
Youth Wing: Young Greens
LGBT Wing: LGBT Greens
European-style sane green party
LIBERTARIAN PARTY:
Founded: July 10, 1993 (By Ron Paul)
Members: 1,000,000
Political Position: Center to Center-Right
Ideology:
-Libertarianism
-Social Liberalism
-Fiscal Conservatism
Youth Wing: Young Libertarians
LGBT Wing: LGBT Libertarians
Reason TV-style consistent Libertarians
OPINION POLLING FOR THE 2024 ELECTION:
November 2020 Results - 29.3% SDP, 24.2% ANF, 18.5% CU, 15.7% ALP, 10.2% GRN, 2.1% LIB (55.2% L - 44.8% R)
June 2023 - 43.5% SDP, 24.2% ANF, 13.5% CU, 10.1% ALP, 7.2% GRN, 1.5% LIB (60.8% L - 39.2% R)
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The 1947 Macedonian royal referendum was held to determine if the Macedonian monarchy should be retained. It was a two part referendum, with the first question asking if Macedonia should retain a monarchy as its form of government. The second question, conditional on the first resulting in the positive, asked if King Philip VI should be the monarch of said government. The monarchy was retained with 54% of the vote, and King Philip was retained with a large 68% outcome, but with a smaller number of responses for the second question.
King Alexander VI was the first monarch of Macedonia, having been installed at the creation of the new state after the end of the Balkan War in 1913. A minor Protestant German prince, he was selected to be a neutral monarch who could unify the disparate ethnoreligious groups of Macedonia. The country was populated by Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim people. Under his reign, the concept of a new Macedonian identity and language separate from its neighbors, particularly Bulgaria, emerged. Alexander VI was a popular monarch for many reasons, the first of which was that he refused to accept the throne unless he was elected by the people. After winning the referendum and presiding over the writing of the new national constitution, his reign was soon interrupted by the First World War, during which Macedonia was occupied by Bulgarian forces. Alexander was forced to flee the country and did not return until after the war. At that time, another referendum was held to determine if Macedonia should remain sovereign or be annexed to Serbia. Alexander successfully campaigned for a sovereign Macedonia and the restoration of his throne.
Macedonia was occupied once again during the Second World War. Alexander did not flee the country, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned by the Italian military. He was liberated by the Allied powers in 1944 and joined the military expedition to free his country from occupation, at which point he was restored to power. However, his time in imprisonment made him sickly and weak, and he died in 1946. A few months before his dead, the first elections of liberated Macedonia were held, and the Communist Party won the most seats due to their popularity as the leaders of the wartime resistance. Alexander allowed the Communists to form a government, over the objections of his Allied backers. A key part of the communist platform was the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a new regime. However, there was considerable tension between the communists and the military, who were loyal to the king and especially reliant on Allied funding and arms. Alexander spent the last few months before his death attempting to reach a peaceful solution between all involved parties.
However, with his death, his 17-year old son Philip came to the throne. Due to his youth and inexperience, a Regency Council was set up for him consisting of his mother, uncle, some generals, and the communist leaders. The Communists attempted to abolish the monarchy by act of parliament, which was blocked by an alliance of all the other parties. This was treated as a vote of no confidence, and the government was dissolved. In the subsequent elections, no party won a clear majority of seats and no combination of parties would agree to form a coalition. Tensions increased as arms and funds poured in from both the United States and the Soviet Union for the military and the communists respectively. In an attempt to avert civil war, Philip VI abolished the regency upon his 18th birthday and successfully convinced the communists to agree to a referendum on the monarchy, promising to step down if he was voted out. They agreed, and a refrendum was set for later in the year.
King Philip did not actively campaign in the referendum. Most political parties, as well as the military, openly supported the continuation of the monarchy. The Communist Party was the only party to officially support the "no" position. Both the Soviet Union and United States interfered in the campaign, spending considerable amounts of money on it, as well as deploying their agents to influence key power players. Ultimately, the monarchy was narrowly retained. Due to the outcome of the vote, the Communist Party splintered into the National Communist Party, which accepted the outcome of the referendum, and the militant Revolutionary Socialist Party, which promptly began a rebellion assisted by the Soviet Union neighboring communist powers. The subsequent Macedonian Civil War last four years, concurrent with the Greek Civil War, and was eventually won by the monarchist faction, with the assistance of the western Allies.
The long term effects of the referendum were stability and legitimacy for the monarchy. Since the first two monarchs of Macedonia had been confirmed by referenda, the next time the National Communist Party was part of government, they institutionalized royal referenda as a part of the constitution as a compromise. This led to subsequent royal elections in 1974, 1999, 2002, and 2010. There is a referendum upon the demise or abdication of the monarch, in which the legal heir is put forth in a straight yes-or-no vote. If the heir is voted down, as happened in 2002, there is an open vote in which all descendants of Alexander VI are eligible for the crown. Furthermore, a government can call a royal referendum with a majority in the Assembly, but a failed vote results in the dissolution of the government. This occurred in 1974 and 2010. Today, Macedonia is considered the only popularly elected monarchy in the world (if Andorra is not counted).
King Alexander VI was the first monarch of Macedonia, having been installed at the creation of the new state after the end of the Balkan War in 1913. A minor Protestant German prince, he was selected to be a neutral monarch who could unify the disparate ethnoreligious groups of Macedonia. The country was populated by Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim people. Under his reign, the concept of a new Macedonian identity and language separate from its neighbors, particularly Bulgaria, emerged. Alexander VI was a popular monarch for many reasons, the first of which was that he refused to accept the throne unless he was elected by the people. After winning the referendum and presiding over the writing of the new national constitution, his reign was soon interrupted by the First World War, during which Macedonia was occupied by Bulgarian forces. Alexander was forced to flee the country and did not return until after the war. At that time, another referendum was held to determine if Macedonia should remain sovereign or be annexed to Serbia. Alexander successfully campaigned for a sovereign Macedonia and the restoration of his throne.
Macedonia was occupied once again during the Second World War. Alexander did not flee the country, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned by the Italian military. He was liberated by the Allied powers in 1944 and joined the military expedition to free his country from occupation, at which point he was restored to power. However, his time in imprisonment made him sickly and weak, and he died in 1946. A few months before his dead, the first elections of liberated Macedonia were held, and the Communist Party won the most seats due to their popularity as the leaders of the wartime resistance. Alexander allowed the Communists to form a government, over the objections of his Allied backers. A key part of the communist platform was the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a new regime. However, there was considerable tension between the communists and the military, who were loyal to the king and especially reliant on Allied funding and arms. Alexander spent the last few months before his death attempting to reach a peaceful solution between all involved parties.
However, with his death, his 17-year old son Philip came to the throne. Due to his youth and inexperience, a Regency Council was set up for him consisting of his mother, uncle, some generals, and the communist leaders. The Communists attempted to abolish the monarchy by act of parliament, which was blocked by an alliance of all the other parties. This was treated as a vote of no confidence, and the government was dissolved. In the subsequent elections, no party won a clear majority of seats and no combination of parties would agree to form a coalition. Tensions increased as arms and funds poured in from both the United States and the Soviet Union for the military and the communists respectively. In an attempt to avert civil war, Philip VI abolished the regency upon his 18th birthday and successfully convinced the communists to agree to a referendum on the monarchy, promising to step down if he was voted out. They agreed, and a refrendum was set for later in the year.
King Philip did not actively campaign in the referendum. Most political parties, as well as the military, openly supported the continuation of the monarchy. The Communist Party was the only party to officially support the "no" position. Both the Soviet Union and United States interfered in the campaign, spending considerable amounts of money on it, as well as deploying their agents to influence key power players. Ultimately, the monarchy was narrowly retained. Due to the outcome of the vote, the Communist Party splintered into the National Communist Party, which accepted the outcome of the referendum, and the militant Revolutionary Socialist Party, which promptly began a rebellion assisted by the Soviet Union neighboring communist powers. The subsequent Macedonian Civil War last four years, concurrent with the Greek Civil War, and was eventually won by the monarchist faction, with the assistance of the western Allies.
The long term effects of the referendum were stability and legitimacy for the monarchy. Since the first two monarchs of Macedonia had been confirmed by referenda, the next time the National Communist Party was part of government, they institutionalized royal referenda as a part of the constitution as a compromise. This led to subsequent royal elections in 1974, 1999, 2002, and 2010. There is a referendum upon the demise or abdication of the monarch, in which the legal heir is put forth in a straight yes-or-no vote. If the heir is voted down, as happened in 2002, there is an open vote in which all descendants of Alexander VI are eligible for the crown. Furthermore, a government can call a royal referendum with a majority in the Assembly, but a failed vote results in the dissolution of the government. This occurred in 1974 and 2010. Today, Macedonia is considered the only popularly elected monarchy in the world (if Andorra is not counted).
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- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
I for one welcome our new Long Live the Three Powers overlords.
Because I saw a typo in an ad of "South London, Ireland":
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With most of the island of Britain consumed in warfare between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Danish & Norman invaders, the kings of Hibernia (as we term it) were able to sail across the sea and nab territory for their own, eventually leading to the House of Bóruma gradually bringing the chaotic land to heel. After the Third Hibernia-Caledon War, all of the lands of Ireland came under one rule from Port Láirge. Eventually, with its collective resources, it was able to dominate the North Atlantic and ironically have their old Norse foes bend the knee in trade & politics; it would also spread itself to the 'New World' with the founding of overseas counties like Bréanainnland.
While Ireland's motto is "Many Families As One", with the flag famously a 'rainbow' with the Irish harp over it, almost half of the nation identifies as a Cal, Saxon, Inuit, Cornish, or some other racial group rather than Gael. These days it's generally only an issue in local politics or in lazy comedy writing, but South London is an exception. One of Ireland's major port cities and formally seperated from the less important North London in the 19th century, a great number of Saxons became wealthy from global trade and a great number of foreigners emigrated to the city and so it developed an identity as something not truly Irish, nor (like the mighty York or Penzance) heavily a non-Gaelic group. Sarflunds call their city "the International City" and are only half-joking.
Scientific romances love to present South London as a seperate city-state, the rival capital during a civil war, and in the Brehon Dread comic it's the corrupt and whacky Eire-City Two that Dread sometimes wearily visits.
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With most of the island of Britain consumed in warfare between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Danish & Norman invaders, the kings of Hibernia (as we term it) were able to sail across the sea and nab territory for their own, eventually leading to the House of Bóruma gradually bringing the chaotic land to heel. After the Third Hibernia-Caledon War, all of the lands of Ireland came under one rule from Port Láirge. Eventually, with its collective resources, it was able to dominate the North Atlantic and ironically have their old Norse foes bend the knee in trade & politics; it would also spread itself to the 'New World' with the founding of overseas counties like Bréanainnland.
While Ireland's motto is "Many Families As One", with the flag famously a 'rainbow' with the Irish harp over it, almost half of the nation identifies as a Cal, Saxon, Inuit, Cornish, or some other racial group rather than Gael. These days it's generally only an issue in local politics or in lazy comedy writing, but South London is an exception. One of Ireland's major port cities and formally seperated from the less important North London in the 19th century, a great number of Saxons became wealthy from global trade and a great number of foreigners emigrated to the city and so it developed an identity as something not truly Irish, nor (like the mighty York or Penzance) heavily a non-Gaelic group. Sarflunds call their city "the International City" and are only half-joking.
Scientific romances love to present South London as a seperate city-state, the rival capital during a civil war, and in the Brehon Dread comic it's the corrupt and whacky Eire-City Two that Dread sometimes wearily visits.
theflyingmgoose
Well-known member
The Presidential Guard is a division of the United States Army tasked with the protection of the President of the United States and his or her family, along with the Vice President and members of the Cabinet. Members receive difficult training, and are well-versed in all types of weapons and strategy. They are the only unit in the armed forces to take a direct loyalty oath to the President in addition to the Constitution. Those serving in the guard can be court martialed for failing to adequately protect the President, with assassination attempts that result in injury to the President or someone they are tasked with protecting usually resulting in multiple convictions (however, the often close bonds between the guards and the people they are assigned to protect usually results in commutations).
Because of this, members of the guard receive up to six times as much as a normal soldier, therefore earning a minimum of $15,000 per month and often as much as four times that. As of 2023, a total of 5,000 soldiers were assigned to the unit, which is also tasked with protecting visiting heads of state. The unit is further divided into five brigades, each focused on separate things (i.e. Cyber Security, Personal Security, Advanced Planning, Quick Response, and Reserves).
Air Force One is the callsign given to the plane currently carrying the President of the United States. While this label can hypothetically be applied to any aircraft carrying the President, it is most often used to refer to one of the five Boeing 747-8i frequently used. Each plan is equipped with advanced military systems, including signal jamming equipment, stealth technology, air-to-air missiles, flares, automated machine guns, and an escape pod. The planes are also escorted by at least two SR-72 Darkstar aircraft at all times.
The Patriot Income Dividend is an conditional universal basic income program in operation in the United States of America since 1973. It was the first such system to be implemented and is often seen as a model for other countries. Unlike most UBI programs, the system works by guaranteeing an income of $18,000 for each American citizen with any declared income. This requirement is voided for those who are disabled, parents, or over the age of 65. The program has largely eliminated poverty in the country.
The Endless Summer
“If everybody had an ocean across the USA, then everybody’d be surfin’ like Californi-a.”
A seminal moment in the history of American music came on 4th March 1963 with the release of The Beach Boys‘ single ‘Surfin’ USA’. Borrowing heavily from the music of Chuck Berry, the song depicted an idyllic California of freedom and prosperity, of carefree surfers, hot rods, and beach parties. The song peaked at No. 2 in the charts, although the key breakthrough of the ‘California Sound’ would arrive in the following year.
On 1st February 1964, the Billboard was headed by the most unusual No. 1 in recent memory. Devoid of the sophisticated orchestration of Spector or Bacharach, the smooth tones of Elvis Presley or the harmonies of the Four Seasons, this was music at its most raw and basic. “Louie, Louie” by the Kingsmen was a cover of an R&B classic but performed with a new beat in a chaotic, crashing, and rock ‘n’ roll style. It seemed to signify that enthusiasm could be as important to rock ‘n’ roll as technical precision and craftsmanship (also demonstrated by the No. 2 single in the charts “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen). The record was hugely influential in the popularisation of “garage rock“, a rebellious new genre and subculture. An attempt by some radio stations to boycott the single for its “offensive lyrics” only led to youth led backlash and its further popularisation, including The Kingsmen’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show to the adoration of fans.
The Kingsmen’s controversial single would be followed by an array of California Sound singles, notably from The Beach Boys with four No. 1 singles in the year, and from The Rivieras, Jan and Dean, and The Rip Chords. The year became known as The Endless Summer, and would be mythologised as an arcadian time before the escalation of the Vietnam War and increasing violence and bitterness at home.
US Billboard No. 1 Singles, 1964
4th January - 1st February: ”There! I’ve Said it Again” by Bobby Vinson
1st February - 22nd February: “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen
22nd February - 14th March: “Dawn (Go Away)” by The Four Seasons
14th March - 28th March: “California Sun” by The Rivieras
28th March - 11th April: “Fun, Fun, Fun” by The Beach Boys
11th April - 9th May: “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean
9th May - 6th June: “My Guy” by Mary Wells
6th June - 13th June: “Walk On By” by Dionne Warwick
13th June - 18th July: “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys
18th July - 1st August: “Don’t Worry Baby” by The Beach Boys
1st August - 22nd August: “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters
22nd August - 19th September: “Where Did Our Love Go?” by The Supremes
19th September - 24th October: “Oh Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison
24th October - 31st October: “Ride the Wild Surf” by Jan and Dean
31st October - 5th December: “The Leader of the Pack” by The Shangri-Las
5th December - 12th December: “Big Man in Town” by The Four Seasons
12th December - 26th December: “Dance Dance Dance” by The Beach Boys
“If everybody had an ocean across the USA, then everybody’d be surfin’ like Californi-a.”
A seminal moment in the history of American music came on 4th March 1963 with the release of The Beach Boys‘ single ‘Surfin’ USA’. Borrowing heavily from the music of Chuck Berry, the song depicted an idyllic California of freedom and prosperity, of carefree surfers, hot rods, and beach parties. The song peaked at No. 2 in the charts, although the key breakthrough of the ‘California Sound’ would arrive in the following year.
On 1st February 1964, the Billboard was headed by the most unusual No. 1 in recent memory. Devoid of the sophisticated orchestration of Spector or Bacharach, the smooth tones of Elvis Presley or the harmonies of the Four Seasons, this was music at its most raw and basic. “Louie, Louie” by the Kingsmen was a cover of an R&B classic but performed with a new beat in a chaotic, crashing, and rock ‘n’ roll style. It seemed to signify that enthusiasm could be as important to rock ‘n’ roll as technical precision and craftsmanship (also demonstrated by the No. 2 single in the charts “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen). The record was hugely influential in the popularisation of “garage rock“, a rebellious new genre and subculture. An attempt by some radio stations to boycott the single for its “offensive lyrics” only led to youth led backlash and its further popularisation, including The Kingsmen’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show to the adoration of fans.
The Kingsmen’s controversial single would be followed by an array of California Sound singles, notably from The Beach Boys with four No. 1 singles in the year, and from The Rivieras, Jan and Dean, and The Rip Chords. The year became known as The Endless Summer, and would be mythologised as an arcadian time before the escalation of the Vietnam War and increasing violence and bitterness at home.
US Billboard No. 1 Singles, 1964
4th January - 1st February: ”There! I’ve Said it Again” by Bobby Vinson
1st February - 22nd February: “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen
22nd February - 14th March: “Dawn (Go Away)” by The Four Seasons
14th March - 28th March: “California Sun” by The Rivieras
28th March - 11th April: “Fun, Fun, Fun” by The Beach Boys
11th April - 9th May: “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean
9th May - 6th June: “My Guy” by Mary Wells
6th June - 13th June: “Walk On By” by Dionne Warwick
13th June - 18th July: “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys
18th July - 1st August: “Don’t Worry Baby” by The Beach Boys
1st August - 22nd August: “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters
22nd August - 19th September: “Where Did Our Love Go?” by The Supremes
19th September - 24th October: “Oh Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison
24th October - 31st October: “Ride the Wild Surf” by Jan and Dean
31st October - 5th December: “The Leader of the Pack” by The Shangri-Las
5th December - 12th December: “Big Man in Town” by The Four Seasons
12th December - 26th December: “Dance Dance Dance” by The Beach Boys
Steve Brinson
The possum is not OK. Neither are we.
- Location
- Brooklyn (originally Houston)
- Pronouns
- he/him
"A Low, Dishonest Decade": Civil Violence Between the Revolutions
On October 14, 1954, the last battle of the Global War Against Imperialism ended with Private Albert Lovell's surrender in North Carolina. Three days earlier and nineteen years after the Constitutionalist Front for which he had nominally fought had surrendered, Lovell's compatriot Private Johnnie Cranford had been shot and wounded by a guard at the Texana Road Warehouse, who initially thought he was a raccoon. After a bungled attempt at breaking Cranford out of jail ended with the death of Sergeant Richard Austin, who had led a three-man unit in petty acts of theft and sabotage for almost sixteen years, Lovell went into hiding in Nantahala National Forest, now part of Appalachian Mountains National Park, where he was discovered and taken into custody by the North Carolina National Guard.
Astonishingly, though, the nineteen years Lovell spent fighting after the CFUSA's surrender did not make up a majority of his time as an organized right-wing combatant, because Lovell had been a militant member of the Ku Klux Klan since 1915, when he had helped break an IWW-backed longshoremen's strike at Newport News. [1] Historians such as Kevin Kruse [2] and Rick Perlstein [3] have argued, based on the examples of Lovell and others like him, in favor of a "Long Global War" interpretation of modern American history: the American Theater of the Global War began, not in 1931 with the Second Battle of Fort Sumter and Josephus Daniels' assertion that "a state of war exists between the Socialist Party of America and those Americans who prefer to follow God and the Constitution, and all Americans must make redoubled efforts to win it", but in 1914 with the beginning of civil violence at home over Roosevelt's decision to bring the United States into the European War. Though violence ebbed and escalated at different points through the period, and though the participants changed over time (most notably, the shift of the National Guard from the Socialists' greatest enemy in the early 1910s to its greatest ally in the 1930s), the conflict fundamentally remained the same; a battle between the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World on one side and a pseudopopulist alliance of reactionary business interests (as typified by Henry Ford) and anti-communist domestic reactionaries such as the Ku Klux Klan. Other historians, such as Gary Gerstle [4], have complicated this account, in particular by highlighting the role of Catholic Action and ethnic societies like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which tended to oppose American involvement in the European War but also strongly opposed the Socialist Party, particularly before the Global War.
What is undeniable, whether one calls the American Theater (or, as it was referred to at the time, the Second Civil War) a continuation of the pre-1931 conflict or a new conflict that arose out of the ashes of the 1910s and 1920s, is that the civil violence of the interrevolutionary period deeply influenced the events of the following decades, up to and including the present. Its legacies are most visible in the Constitutionalist Front and its cobelligerents, who were forged in the fires of informal war against the Socialists - an informal war that helped meld the "All-American" forces who had supported Roosevelt's war and fought its opponents as traitors and the conservative anti-war forces who had seen Roosevelt as exceeding Presidential authority to send American boys to die in a cause they had nothing to do with, but had neither a class critique of the war nor a substantive class critique of Rooseveltism. But the Socialist Party also came out of the period changed - in the South, it built a role for itself protecting Afro-Americans from public and private violence and keeping the Klan at bay, while in the North its battles with Catholic and middle-class Anglo militants complicated its coalitional politics. Moreover, the rising role of Workers' Defense meant that the Socialist Party had trained cadres like Ed Flynn, Harry Haywood, and Alonzo Watson ready to help lead and win the most destructive war in seventy years, and those leaders carried out that war using tactics that were unconventional for the military of the time but conventional for the experience of the Twenties. The Socialists' experience during this period also complicated their attitude towards the masses - though on the one hand their efforts to win the hearts and minds of Anglo Southerners in order to "drain the fetid swamps out of which Rooseveltism breeds" [5] helped the party hone its tools for converting those outside its traditional social and economic base, the early failures also led to a sort of spurned pessimism about the possibility of the American "middle class" being converted to socialism and a broader skepticism of "head-democracy" as opposed to "mass-democracy" or "work-democracy", a skepticism that instantiated itself in some of the more anti-democratic excesses of the Heinlein and postwar Browder administrations. [6]
This book will analyze the "long Twenties" through a chronological timeline of the conflict's different phases. Chapter One will begin with a brief summary of civil violence in the period before Roosevelt's third term, primarily focusing on Redemptionist violence in the South (particularly the Wilmington massacre) and anti-worker violence across the country, before focusing on the Roosevelt era in particular. Though initially it appeared that Roosevelt's progressivism might offer a third way of durable cross-class compromise, his proposed reforms were fundamentally elite-led and philanthropic rather than based in working-class agency, and they were quickly abandoned in order to buy elite and corporate support for American intervention. Though contemporary estimates held that around two-thirds of Americans opposed entry to the war [7], many members of the pro-war minority viewed the opposition as essentially treasonous and driven by foreign or otherwise disloyal elements and joined militant organizations like the Victory and Vigilance League. These militant groups escalated the conflict at home by forcibly breaking strikes and physically fighting anti-war groups, operating in many cases as a deniable arm of the National Guard or state and local police forces; that escalation meant that previously peaceful organizations, including both the IWW and ethnoreligious societies like the Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of Hibernians, began practicing self-defense in advance of potential conflict. One particularly interesting example is that of the Ku Klux Klan - though initially and at its revival it had been a unified organization, the salience of the war and the popularity of isolationism in Klan heartlands like the South and Midwest meant that individual chapters took different lines on the conflict, formed separate organizations (the pro-war All-American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the isolationist Authentic Ku Klux Klan), and often actively fought each other. Finally, the chapter describes the Winter of Discontent and the roles of the organizations described in it.
Chapter Two will cover the Bryan presidency and the crack-up of the Winter of Discontent coalition. In particular, Bryan was supported by both the IWW/SPA itself, newly legitimized by its crucial role in overthrowing Roosevelt, and by the Democratic Party, which contained sizable contingents of rural Southern grands blancs and petits blancs who viewed efforts to organize Afro-Southern sharecroppers as not only a threat to their pocketbooks but a potential threat to their lives, as well as Catholic ethnic whites (particularly those of Irish, Italian, and Polish heritage) who feared that Socialist rule would lead to anticlerical violence and a resumption of Rooseveltist forced assimilation. For many of the latter group, the Mexican Revolution seemed to confirm their fears, and many Catholic veterans (as well as a sizable contingent of Protestant or secular mercenaries) joined the Cristero cause and helped build links between ultraconservatives on both sides of the border. The economic crisis of the late 1910s provided an accelerant to these social disruptions; the combination of the end of American war lending, the end of American military production, the constrained economies of would-be European trading partners still mired in the war (or, after December 1919, recovering from the war), the glut in labor from returning veterans and immigration, and conflicts between capital and labor all led to an economic polycrisis marked by high rates of both inflation and unemployment. In this environment, Socialist successes in midterm state and local elections gave reactionaries reason to fear the shape of things to come and gave Socialists a new role as state administrators and defenders of law and public order. The last part of the chapter describes the rise of Evangelical Christianity among conservative rural working-class whites, the reassembly of the Klan as a xenophobic, white-supremacist, and anti-socialist organization, and the collapse of the Democratic Party amidst Josephus Daniels' aggressively sectionalist campaign.
Chapter Three will cover the 1920 election, violence against local and national Socialist campaigns, and the legal and physical campaign to prevent Debs' election (either on the grounds that the IWW had intimidated voters or falsified returns, on the grounds that Socialism itself was incompatible with the Constitution and therefore Debs' candidacy was invalid, or on the grounds that LaFollette's directive that his electors should vote for Debs to prevent a contingent election was invalid, illegal, or anti-democratic), before transitioning into a discussion of the Debs era itself. Capitalists attempted to organize on both the national and local levels, initially by attempting a "capital strike" couched in the language of profitability and the "security of property rights"; when the Socialist-led First Popular Front House majority convinced the Democratic Senate majority to consent to the Cooperative Ownership and Investment Act, large segments of the commanding heights of American finance took the offered deal (in the process becoming much closer, operationally and politically, to labor-aristocracy institutions), leaving a minority of reactionary financiers and a larger contingent of small businessmen feeling duped, used, or betrayed. Many of those went on to join or bankroll right-wing organizations to fight the Socialists, whether legal or extralegal, eventually ending up as the strongest backers of the reactionary militants of the American Theater. Meanwhile, other conservatives were radicalized as a result of the cultural changes of the era - women entered the workforce, Afro-Americans demanded and won greater rights, immigration increased sharply, and social reproduction fundamentally changed as women attained greater equality and uranian relationships became more publicly accepted, leading to authors like Booth Tarkington and Robert Penn Warren depicting the agrarian conservatism of their milieux in books like Tarkington's The Golden Age and Warren's Antaeus. Amidst this progressive change, reactionary groups like the Northern Klan recruited, and evangelical groups organized to prohibit the sale of alcohol (including the so-called "Whiskey Rebellion" in Kentucky) and the teaching of evolution; in the west, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints stepped up its own evangelism and social action in response to the rising IWW. Abroad, many Americans joined private mercenary forces (both corporate and religious) in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, while the aftermath of the European War led to a Second Springtime of Nations in 1921 and 1922, including revolutions in Germany and Russia and the formation of more than a dozen new nations in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; revolutionaries abroad inspired American thinkers and activists, both socialist and conservative. Lastly, the chapter will discuss political tensions over disarmament and veteran benefits, including the Bonus Army Movement.
Chapter Four, covering the Haywood era, will begin with a discussion of internal tensions within the Socialist Party, in particular tensions between the historic urban immigrant base of the party and the rising rural contingent of Farmer-Laborites and IWW members and conflicts over the increasing role of the IWW within the party and over policies like immigration and secularism. These dynamics affected the intra-party contest to succeed President Debs after his untimely 1924 death and ensured that the victor of that contest would be IWW Secretary-General William Haywood. Haywood changed the party's relationship to its opposition with his open support of political strikes against the conservative state government of California and municipal government of Philadelphia; this led to escalating tensions with corporate militias like the Pinkertons, reactionary groups, and government forces in conservative areas, including retaliatory actions against uninvolved groups and in Socialist-governed areas. This led to the Red Summer in 1925; though more moderate forces in the Socialist Party, especially in congressional and state offices, were able to convince Haywood that deescalation was necessary at the Willard Hotel Meeting in July 1925, the nature of the IWW as an organization vulnerable to hardliner extremism meant that Haywood had very little success with an initiative his heart wasn't really in. The persistence of anti-socialist violence led to both the professionalization and national spread of Workers Defense Clubs and to substantial reforms to police-militia forces in Red jurisdictions, most notably Edward Flynn's NYPD. Amidst the violence, radical right-wing papers like Harry Chandler's California Evening Star and the Hearst empire proliferated, and the rise of private radio ownership led to a new market for right-wing radio broadcasting such as that of Father Coughlin - many of these stations were bankrolled by reactionary businessmen like Henry Ford and located in areas outside the jurisdiction of American law and the power of the FCC, most notably Mexico, Canada, and Cuba. These news sources, as well as their counterparts on the left and center, made the public aware of major scandals in all major parties, leading to a widespread mood of disillusionment with electoral politics in general and the post-1916 settlement in particular; the former led to the rising Exile movement, with religious communes appearing across much of the West, while the latter led to a resurgent Rooseveltist movement under the aegis of the Action Party, epitomized by figures like Ford, Roosevelt's cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and academic Ray Lyman Wilbur. The Mexican Civil War continued, with warlords like Pancho Villa making incursions into the United States to interdict IWW or Galvánist aid to forces in Mexico; the United States threatened military action over the British occupation of the Yucatán Peninsula, sparking debates over the role of an interventionist military under a socialist government and a durable rift between isolationists and the Socialist Party. The 1926 midterm elections ended with decisive majorities for the bourgeois parties despite a strong socialist vote, making it possible for congressional supermajorities to begin heavily politicized investigations of the Haywood administration, the Socialist Party, and the IWW, only terminated by the untimely death of Vice President Reed in April 1927 and President Haywood that December.
Chapter Five will describe the era between Haywood's death and Browder's election, beginning with the Days of Rage. As rumors that Haywood was poisoned to death proliferated through IWW strongholds like the Bronx, San Francisco, and the timber country of Idaho, Workers Defense cadres energized by the tragedy and by the examples of Red success in Czechoslovakia announced their loyalty to IWW interim Secretary-General Harry Bridges and attempted to mount a socialist revolution. Though their efforts petered out quickly, they led to both enduring discontent within the Socialist Party and to conservative inflammation against the Socialist Party as the political wing of December 1927's rioters and insurrectionists. The coalition that backed Butler and later Seabury's efforts to check the power of the IWW and allow bourgeois governments to dictate terms to labor was hardened and unified by that pressure, but riven by internal discontent, particularly between moderates who drew a distinction between the excesses of Haywood and the IWW and the more legitimate actions of Socialist and Socialist-backed coalition governments and hardliners who thought Seabury's insistence on keeping to legal challenges and dismissing attempts to ban the Socialist Party as illegal conspiracy were somewhere between passively and actively treasonous, as well as between the Republican and Democratic components of the coalition and between secularists, Protestant evangelicals, and Catholics. These stresses were widened by General Pershing's decision to invade Mexico and occupy Veracruz in order to "stabilize" the country, support the conservative government, and prevent the conflict from leading to escalations in stateside civil violence, and President Butler and Seabury's treatment of the invasion as a fait accompli; the invasion led to both isolationists and supporters of right-wing Catholic paramilitaries losing trust in the government. Additionally, conservative Southern state governments used their key role in the governing coalition to extract federal support for repressive measures against both the IWW and dedicated civil rights or self-government organizations; Seabury's acquiescence despite his personal belief in racial equality led Northern racial liberals, even those opposed to the Socialists, to jump ship. Civil violence reached a relatively low ebb in the mid-Butler presidency, as the most militant socialists were arrested or forced underground, less militant socialists took advantage of Seabury's relative commitment to "democracy through law" to organize electorally; federal-level austerity and economic disruption led to broad unpopularity and a strong Socialist performance in the 1930 midterms. The prospect of a chastened Socialist Party forming government was unconscionable to many reactionaries, who organized legal and extralegal campaigns against newly-elected state and local governments across the country; the federal government attempted to use the National Guard to suppress these insurrections, but often found that the National Guard was itself infiltrated or at least influenced by reactionaries who would refuse to fight their ideological allies, or would do so to a strictly nominal degree. The final section of the chapter covers the involvement of reactionary groups in the General Strike, beginning with their involvement in the Michigan Campaign, from their efforts breaking strikes and supporting strikebreakers in Dearborn to their support of the National Guard's assault on the elected state government in the Battle of Lansing, and continuing through the Second Red Summer up to Seabury's agreement to resign in favor of a caretaker government and the September 1931 special election that elected Browder.
The final chapter will discuss the aftermaths of the civil violence of the late 1910s and 1920s. These aftermaths were most visible in the right-wing militarized groups that carried out the anti-socialist side of the American Theater, virtually all of which were either founded in the preceding decade-and-a-half or descended from groups that were. But other consequences were visible in the practices of the wartime Socialist Party, both directly in the sphere of the war and more indirectly in the coalitional politics of the Popular Front and in civil government; many of these practices lasted well after the war. Other legacies were visible in the cultural sphere, where the disorder of the interrevolutionary period both legitimized Socialist practice and provided an explanation or a scapegoat for its excesses; the war itself proved a useful and interesting setting for authors within and without America. Finally, groups across the world learned from and were inspired by all sides of the conflict, from German and Franco-Russian tacticians in the European Theater to revolutionary groups from China to Chile and the governments of all stripes that sought to keep them under control.
C. Rayford Diaz
Jarboe, Tex.
January 30, 2010
[1] Account taken from Rick Perlstein's Arcadia: Norman Podhoretz, the Fifties, and the Rise of Socialist Conservatism (2006), Chapter 5 "The Holdouts", pp. 78-91.
[2] For example, in Fires on the Prairie: Racial Politics and Urban Policy in the Great Plains, 1896-1944 (2004) and Out of the Blue: Faultlines in Postwar American Politics (2009).
[3] See Arcadia above, as well as Perlstein's articles "Galvánized America" (New York Review of Books, 2004) and "The Secret History of Reaganism - and Summersism" (Asahi Shimbun English, 2009).
[4] See American Crucible (1998) and Making Workers Into Americans (2006).
[5] Quoted from W. E. B. Du Bois' "Sowing and Reaping in Georgia" (The Messenger, 1924; reprinted and edited in Democracy in America, 1943).
[6] See Donald Critchlow's The Majority Ascendant (2005) and William Taubman's Robert Heinlein: The Man and His Era (2003) for a fuller treatment of this era.
[7] Estimated by David M. Kennedy in The American People in the European War (1975).
On October 14, 1954, the last battle of the Global War Against Imperialism ended with Private Albert Lovell's surrender in North Carolina. Three days earlier and nineteen years after the Constitutionalist Front for which he had nominally fought had surrendered, Lovell's compatriot Private Johnnie Cranford had been shot and wounded by a guard at the Texana Road Warehouse, who initially thought he was a raccoon. After a bungled attempt at breaking Cranford out of jail ended with the death of Sergeant Richard Austin, who had led a three-man unit in petty acts of theft and sabotage for almost sixteen years, Lovell went into hiding in Nantahala National Forest, now part of Appalachian Mountains National Park, where he was discovered and taken into custody by the North Carolina National Guard.
Astonishingly, though, the nineteen years Lovell spent fighting after the CFUSA's surrender did not make up a majority of his time as an organized right-wing combatant, because Lovell had been a militant member of the Ku Klux Klan since 1915, when he had helped break an IWW-backed longshoremen's strike at Newport News. [1] Historians such as Kevin Kruse [2] and Rick Perlstein [3] have argued, based on the examples of Lovell and others like him, in favor of a "Long Global War" interpretation of modern American history: the American Theater of the Global War began, not in 1931 with the Second Battle of Fort Sumter and Josephus Daniels' assertion that "a state of war exists between the Socialist Party of America and those Americans who prefer to follow God and the Constitution, and all Americans must make redoubled efforts to win it", but in 1914 with the beginning of civil violence at home over Roosevelt's decision to bring the United States into the European War. Though violence ebbed and escalated at different points through the period, and though the participants changed over time (most notably, the shift of the National Guard from the Socialists' greatest enemy in the early 1910s to its greatest ally in the 1930s), the conflict fundamentally remained the same; a battle between the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World on one side and a pseudopopulist alliance of reactionary business interests (as typified by Henry Ford) and anti-communist domestic reactionaries such as the Ku Klux Klan. Other historians, such as Gary Gerstle [4], have complicated this account, in particular by highlighting the role of Catholic Action and ethnic societies like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which tended to oppose American involvement in the European War but also strongly opposed the Socialist Party, particularly before the Global War.
What is undeniable, whether one calls the American Theater (or, as it was referred to at the time, the Second Civil War) a continuation of the pre-1931 conflict or a new conflict that arose out of the ashes of the 1910s and 1920s, is that the civil violence of the interrevolutionary period deeply influenced the events of the following decades, up to and including the present. Its legacies are most visible in the Constitutionalist Front and its cobelligerents, who were forged in the fires of informal war against the Socialists - an informal war that helped meld the "All-American" forces who had supported Roosevelt's war and fought its opponents as traitors and the conservative anti-war forces who had seen Roosevelt as exceeding Presidential authority to send American boys to die in a cause they had nothing to do with, but had neither a class critique of the war nor a substantive class critique of Rooseveltism. But the Socialist Party also came out of the period changed - in the South, it built a role for itself protecting Afro-Americans from public and private violence and keeping the Klan at bay, while in the North its battles with Catholic and middle-class Anglo militants complicated its coalitional politics. Moreover, the rising role of Workers' Defense meant that the Socialist Party had trained cadres like Ed Flynn, Harry Haywood, and Alonzo Watson ready to help lead and win the most destructive war in seventy years, and those leaders carried out that war using tactics that were unconventional for the military of the time but conventional for the experience of the Twenties. The Socialists' experience during this period also complicated their attitude towards the masses - though on the one hand their efforts to win the hearts and minds of Anglo Southerners in order to "drain the fetid swamps out of which Rooseveltism breeds" [5] helped the party hone its tools for converting those outside its traditional social and economic base, the early failures also led to a sort of spurned pessimism about the possibility of the American "middle class" being converted to socialism and a broader skepticism of "head-democracy" as opposed to "mass-democracy" or "work-democracy", a skepticism that instantiated itself in some of the more anti-democratic excesses of the Heinlein and postwar Browder administrations. [6]
This book will analyze the "long Twenties" through a chronological timeline of the conflict's different phases. Chapter One will begin with a brief summary of civil violence in the period before Roosevelt's third term, primarily focusing on Redemptionist violence in the South (particularly the Wilmington massacre) and anti-worker violence across the country, before focusing on the Roosevelt era in particular. Though initially it appeared that Roosevelt's progressivism might offer a third way of durable cross-class compromise, his proposed reforms were fundamentally elite-led and philanthropic rather than based in working-class agency, and they were quickly abandoned in order to buy elite and corporate support for American intervention. Though contemporary estimates held that around two-thirds of Americans opposed entry to the war [7], many members of the pro-war minority viewed the opposition as essentially treasonous and driven by foreign or otherwise disloyal elements and joined militant organizations like the Victory and Vigilance League. These militant groups escalated the conflict at home by forcibly breaking strikes and physically fighting anti-war groups, operating in many cases as a deniable arm of the National Guard or state and local police forces; that escalation meant that previously peaceful organizations, including both the IWW and ethnoreligious societies like the Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of Hibernians, began practicing self-defense in advance of potential conflict. One particularly interesting example is that of the Ku Klux Klan - though initially and at its revival it had been a unified organization, the salience of the war and the popularity of isolationism in Klan heartlands like the South and Midwest meant that individual chapters took different lines on the conflict, formed separate organizations (the pro-war All-American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the isolationist Authentic Ku Klux Klan), and often actively fought each other. Finally, the chapter describes the Winter of Discontent and the roles of the organizations described in it.
Chapter Two will cover the Bryan presidency and the crack-up of the Winter of Discontent coalition. In particular, Bryan was supported by both the IWW/SPA itself, newly legitimized by its crucial role in overthrowing Roosevelt, and by the Democratic Party, which contained sizable contingents of rural Southern grands blancs and petits blancs who viewed efforts to organize Afro-Southern sharecroppers as not only a threat to their pocketbooks but a potential threat to their lives, as well as Catholic ethnic whites (particularly those of Irish, Italian, and Polish heritage) who feared that Socialist rule would lead to anticlerical violence and a resumption of Rooseveltist forced assimilation. For many of the latter group, the Mexican Revolution seemed to confirm their fears, and many Catholic veterans (as well as a sizable contingent of Protestant or secular mercenaries) joined the Cristero cause and helped build links between ultraconservatives on both sides of the border. The economic crisis of the late 1910s provided an accelerant to these social disruptions; the combination of the end of American war lending, the end of American military production, the constrained economies of would-be European trading partners still mired in the war (or, after December 1919, recovering from the war), the glut in labor from returning veterans and immigration, and conflicts between capital and labor all led to an economic polycrisis marked by high rates of both inflation and unemployment. In this environment, Socialist successes in midterm state and local elections gave reactionaries reason to fear the shape of things to come and gave Socialists a new role as state administrators and defenders of law and public order. The last part of the chapter describes the rise of Evangelical Christianity among conservative rural working-class whites, the reassembly of the Klan as a xenophobic, white-supremacist, and anti-socialist organization, and the collapse of the Democratic Party amidst Josephus Daniels' aggressively sectionalist campaign.
Chapter Three will cover the 1920 election, violence against local and national Socialist campaigns, and the legal and physical campaign to prevent Debs' election (either on the grounds that the IWW had intimidated voters or falsified returns, on the grounds that Socialism itself was incompatible with the Constitution and therefore Debs' candidacy was invalid, or on the grounds that LaFollette's directive that his electors should vote for Debs to prevent a contingent election was invalid, illegal, or anti-democratic), before transitioning into a discussion of the Debs era itself. Capitalists attempted to organize on both the national and local levels, initially by attempting a "capital strike" couched in the language of profitability and the "security of property rights"; when the Socialist-led First Popular Front House majority convinced the Democratic Senate majority to consent to the Cooperative Ownership and Investment Act, large segments of the commanding heights of American finance took the offered deal (in the process becoming much closer, operationally and politically, to labor-aristocracy institutions), leaving a minority of reactionary financiers and a larger contingent of small businessmen feeling duped, used, or betrayed. Many of those went on to join or bankroll right-wing organizations to fight the Socialists, whether legal or extralegal, eventually ending up as the strongest backers of the reactionary militants of the American Theater. Meanwhile, other conservatives were radicalized as a result of the cultural changes of the era - women entered the workforce, Afro-Americans demanded and won greater rights, immigration increased sharply, and social reproduction fundamentally changed as women attained greater equality and uranian relationships became more publicly accepted, leading to authors like Booth Tarkington and Robert Penn Warren depicting the agrarian conservatism of their milieux in books like Tarkington's The Golden Age and Warren's Antaeus. Amidst this progressive change, reactionary groups like the Northern Klan recruited, and evangelical groups organized to prohibit the sale of alcohol (including the so-called "Whiskey Rebellion" in Kentucky) and the teaching of evolution; in the west, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints stepped up its own evangelism and social action in response to the rising IWW. Abroad, many Americans joined private mercenary forces (both corporate and religious) in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, while the aftermath of the European War led to a Second Springtime of Nations in 1921 and 1922, including revolutions in Germany and Russia and the formation of more than a dozen new nations in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; revolutionaries abroad inspired American thinkers and activists, both socialist and conservative. Lastly, the chapter will discuss political tensions over disarmament and veteran benefits, including the Bonus Army Movement.
Chapter Four, covering the Haywood era, will begin with a discussion of internal tensions within the Socialist Party, in particular tensions between the historic urban immigrant base of the party and the rising rural contingent of Farmer-Laborites and IWW members and conflicts over the increasing role of the IWW within the party and over policies like immigration and secularism. These dynamics affected the intra-party contest to succeed President Debs after his untimely 1924 death and ensured that the victor of that contest would be IWW Secretary-General William Haywood. Haywood changed the party's relationship to its opposition with his open support of political strikes against the conservative state government of California and municipal government of Philadelphia; this led to escalating tensions with corporate militias like the Pinkertons, reactionary groups, and government forces in conservative areas, including retaliatory actions against uninvolved groups and in Socialist-governed areas. This led to the Red Summer in 1925; though more moderate forces in the Socialist Party, especially in congressional and state offices, were able to convince Haywood that deescalation was necessary at the Willard Hotel Meeting in July 1925, the nature of the IWW as an organization vulnerable to hardliner extremism meant that Haywood had very little success with an initiative his heart wasn't really in. The persistence of anti-socialist violence led to both the professionalization and national spread of Workers Defense Clubs and to substantial reforms to police-militia forces in Red jurisdictions, most notably Edward Flynn's NYPD. Amidst the violence, radical right-wing papers like Harry Chandler's California Evening Star and the Hearst empire proliferated, and the rise of private radio ownership led to a new market for right-wing radio broadcasting such as that of Father Coughlin - many of these stations were bankrolled by reactionary businessmen like Henry Ford and located in areas outside the jurisdiction of American law and the power of the FCC, most notably Mexico, Canada, and Cuba. These news sources, as well as their counterparts on the left and center, made the public aware of major scandals in all major parties, leading to a widespread mood of disillusionment with electoral politics in general and the post-1916 settlement in particular; the former led to the rising Exile movement, with religious communes appearing across much of the West, while the latter led to a resurgent Rooseveltist movement under the aegis of the Action Party, epitomized by figures like Ford, Roosevelt's cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and academic Ray Lyman Wilbur. The Mexican Civil War continued, with warlords like Pancho Villa making incursions into the United States to interdict IWW or Galvánist aid to forces in Mexico; the United States threatened military action over the British occupation of the Yucatán Peninsula, sparking debates over the role of an interventionist military under a socialist government and a durable rift between isolationists and the Socialist Party. The 1926 midterm elections ended with decisive majorities for the bourgeois parties despite a strong socialist vote, making it possible for congressional supermajorities to begin heavily politicized investigations of the Haywood administration, the Socialist Party, and the IWW, only terminated by the untimely death of Vice President Reed in April 1927 and President Haywood that December.
Chapter Five will describe the era between Haywood's death and Browder's election, beginning with the Days of Rage. As rumors that Haywood was poisoned to death proliferated through IWW strongholds like the Bronx, San Francisco, and the timber country of Idaho, Workers Defense cadres energized by the tragedy and by the examples of Red success in Czechoslovakia announced their loyalty to IWW interim Secretary-General Harry Bridges and attempted to mount a socialist revolution. Though their efforts petered out quickly, they led to both enduring discontent within the Socialist Party and to conservative inflammation against the Socialist Party as the political wing of December 1927's rioters and insurrectionists. The coalition that backed Butler and later Seabury's efforts to check the power of the IWW and allow bourgeois governments to dictate terms to labor was hardened and unified by that pressure, but riven by internal discontent, particularly between moderates who drew a distinction between the excesses of Haywood and the IWW and the more legitimate actions of Socialist and Socialist-backed coalition governments and hardliners who thought Seabury's insistence on keeping to legal challenges and dismissing attempts to ban the Socialist Party as illegal conspiracy were somewhere between passively and actively treasonous, as well as between the Republican and Democratic components of the coalition and between secularists, Protestant evangelicals, and Catholics. These stresses were widened by General Pershing's decision to invade Mexico and occupy Veracruz in order to "stabilize" the country, support the conservative government, and prevent the conflict from leading to escalations in stateside civil violence, and President Butler and Seabury's treatment of the invasion as a fait accompli; the invasion led to both isolationists and supporters of right-wing Catholic paramilitaries losing trust in the government. Additionally, conservative Southern state governments used their key role in the governing coalition to extract federal support for repressive measures against both the IWW and dedicated civil rights or self-government organizations; Seabury's acquiescence despite his personal belief in racial equality led Northern racial liberals, even those opposed to the Socialists, to jump ship. Civil violence reached a relatively low ebb in the mid-Butler presidency, as the most militant socialists were arrested or forced underground, less militant socialists took advantage of Seabury's relative commitment to "democracy through law" to organize electorally; federal-level austerity and economic disruption led to broad unpopularity and a strong Socialist performance in the 1930 midterms. The prospect of a chastened Socialist Party forming government was unconscionable to many reactionaries, who organized legal and extralegal campaigns against newly-elected state and local governments across the country; the federal government attempted to use the National Guard to suppress these insurrections, but often found that the National Guard was itself infiltrated or at least influenced by reactionaries who would refuse to fight their ideological allies, or would do so to a strictly nominal degree. The final section of the chapter covers the involvement of reactionary groups in the General Strike, beginning with their involvement in the Michigan Campaign, from their efforts breaking strikes and supporting strikebreakers in Dearborn to their support of the National Guard's assault on the elected state government in the Battle of Lansing, and continuing through the Second Red Summer up to Seabury's agreement to resign in favor of a caretaker government and the September 1931 special election that elected Browder.
The final chapter will discuss the aftermaths of the civil violence of the late 1910s and 1920s. These aftermaths were most visible in the right-wing militarized groups that carried out the anti-socialist side of the American Theater, virtually all of which were either founded in the preceding decade-and-a-half or descended from groups that were. But other consequences were visible in the practices of the wartime Socialist Party, both directly in the sphere of the war and more indirectly in the coalitional politics of the Popular Front and in civil government; many of these practices lasted well after the war. Other legacies were visible in the cultural sphere, where the disorder of the interrevolutionary period both legitimized Socialist practice and provided an explanation or a scapegoat for its excesses; the war itself proved a useful and interesting setting for authors within and without America. Finally, groups across the world learned from and were inspired by all sides of the conflict, from German and Franco-Russian tacticians in the European Theater to revolutionary groups from China to Chile and the governments of all stripes that sought to keep them under control.
C. Rayford Diaz
Jarboe, Tex.
January 30, 2010
[1] Account taken from Rick Perlstein's Arcadia: Norman Podhoretz, the Fifties, and the Rise of Socialist Conservatism (2006), Chapter 5 "The Holdouts", pp. 78-91.
[2] For example, in Fires on the Prairie: Racial Politics and Urban Policy in the Great Plains, 1896-1944 (2004) and Out of the Blue: Faultlines in Postwar American Politics (2009).
[3] See Arcadia above, as well as Perlstein's articles "Galvánized America" (New York Review of Books, 2004) and "The Secret History of Reaganism - and Summersism" (Asahi Shimbun English, 2009).
[4] See American Crucible (1998) and Making Workers Into Americans (2006).
[5] Quoted from W. E. B. Du Bois' "Sowing and Reaping in Georgia" (The Messenger, 1924; reprinted and edited in Democracy in America, 1943).
[6] See Donald Critchlow's The Majority Ascendant (2005) and William Taubman's Robert Heinlein: The Man and His Era (2003) for a fuller treatment of this era.
[7] Estimated by David M. Kennedy in The American People in the European War (1975).
This is phenomenal, thanks for sharing.
Operation Stone was the overarching plan for multiple Allied operations in 1943 to draw German forces to Sardinia and then drop the experimental atom bomb on them. The bombing has been controversial since 1943 for two reasons:
a) While the blast killed thousands of German and Italian soldiers, gutting the 1st Panzer Division, it also killed thousands more Italian civilians both at the time and with lingering radioactive fallout & severe fire damage that tore through the island
b) As this was the only such bomb the Allies had, and they hadn't been able to test it nor could be certain the bomber wouldn't be shot down, it was gambling the entire front on a roll of the dice - and if the bomb did work or was captured, it would light a fire under the German's own stalled atomic project
In the end, after the initial panic and Mussolini's unconditional surrender, Germany did hold its nerve and correctly guessed the Allies were bluffing. Western Allied forces would spend the rest of 1943 fighting a grinding slog marching into France, holding down German divisions in Greece, and heavily bombing Austrian infrastructure. The Red Army, meanwhile, drove the Wermacht out of most of their land. The Germans would overhaul their atomic bomb project and used it to strike the Leningrad Front and tens of thousands of civilians in the area - itself a bluff, one Stalin called, and was a sunk-cost on German resources. Germany finally surrendered in April 1944 and Japan would surrender in early 1945 when it became clear the Red Army and US Marines would jointly invade. New atomic bombs were not complete by the war's end.
The main Allied nations - US, UK, USSR, and China - would all have atomic weaponry by the end of 1940s as part of the controversial 'Four Policeman' deal under the United Nations and work together to stop other nations in their respective 'spheres' from developing it. The atomic bomb would remain a tool in each country's arsenals until the 1960s, as the Pax Polis era broke down into the Cold War and an arms race for atomic missiles made it clear London, DC, Moscow, and Peking could all now be hit just as easily as they'd hit 'rogue nations'. The knowledge of what would happen was termed "Mutual Assured Decimation" and would hang over the world until the 2000 Sardinia Conference, where the four nations agreed to reduce their arsenals by half as a sign of the new millenium.
a) While the blast killed thousands of German and Italian soldiers, gutting the 1st Panzer Division, it also killed thousands more Italian civilians both at the time and with lingering radioactive fallout & severe fire damage that tore through the island
b) As this was the only such bomb the Allies had, and they hadn't been able to test it nor could be certain the bomber wouldn't be shot down, it was gambling the entire front on a roll of the dice - and if the bomb did work or was captured, it would light a fire under the German's own stalled atomic project
In the end, after the initial panic and Mussolini's unconditional surrender, Germany did hold its nerve and correctly guessed the Allies were bluffing. Western Allied forces would spend the rest of 1943 fighting a grinding slog marching into France, holding down German divisions in Greece, and heavily bombing Austrian infrastructure. The Red Army, meanwhile, drove the Wermacht out of most of their land. The Germans would overhaul their atomic bomb project and used it to strike the Leningrad Front and tens of thousands of civilians in the area - itself a bluff, one Stalin called, and was a sunk-cost on German resources. Germany finally surrendered in April 1944 and Japan would surrender in early 1945 when it became clear the Red Army and US Marines would jointly invade. New atomic bombs were not complete by the war's end.
The main Allied nations - US, UK, USSR, and China - would all have atomic weaponry by the end of 1940s as part of the controversial 'Four Policeman' deal under the United Nations and work together to stop other nations in their respective 'spheres' from developing it. The atomic bomb would remain a tool in each country's arsenals until the 1960s, as the Pax Polis era broke down into the Cold War and an arms race for atomic missiles made it clear London, DC, Moscow, and Peking could all now be hit just as easily as they'd hit 'rogue nations'. The knowledge of what would happen was termed "Mutual Assured Decimation" and would hang over the world until the 2000 Sardinia Conference, where the four nations agreed to reduce their arsenals by half as a sign of the new millenium.
theflyingmgoose
Well-known member
Elections for the United States Senate were held on November 8, 2022, one half of the way through President James Kaufman's first term. One third of the seats were up for election. The American Senate is more powerful than most parliamentary democracies, with exclusive power over the confirmation of judicial and executive appointments along with the ability to veto legislation passed by the House if at least 85 of the 150 Senators vote against the bill.
While governments typically lose seats in off-year elections, the incumbent Kaufman Government was one of the most popular in recent memory. Over the past two years, the country had seen massive economic growth, which generated increased tax revenue for Kaufman's vast social program expansions, including expanding universal healthcare to include prescription drugs, vision, and dental care along with an expansion of the Patriot Income Dividend for families.
Several commentators suggested that the election could be a referendum on the White House's proposed expansion of the carbon pricing scheme, which was slammed as "authoritarian job-eliminating socialism" by opposition leader and former President Nicole Kim.
On election day, Kaufman's flagship SDP and its allied parties collected nearly 60% of the vote, easily maintaining control of the Senate. Despite a continued drop in Liberal vote share, the SDP's vast gains kept the governing coalition well ahead of its rivals. Repeating previous trends, the National Front gained seats at the expense of the Conservative Union, which would lead to the resignation of CU leader Adam Kinzinger days later. The Senate, while technically beginning their terms on January 3, 2023, would first be convened on February 7, 2023 for President Kaufman's State of the Nation Address.
2022 United States Senate Elections:
Social Democratic (SDP) - 41,377,752 (37.2%) | 50 Senators (+8)
National Front (ANF) - 27,918,859 (25.1%) | 36 Senators (+2)
Conservative Union (CU) - 15,572,272 (14.0%) | 30 Senators (-2)
Liberal Party (ALP) - 13,236,431 (11.9%) | 21 Senators (-9)
Green League (GRN) - 11,123,051 (10.0%) | 11 Senators (+1)
Libertarian Party (LIB) - 2,002,149 (1.8%) | 2 Senators (-)
PAN-LEFT: 65,737,234 (59.1%) - 82 Seats (-)
PAN-RIGHT: 45,493,280 (40.9%) - 68 Seats (-)
While governments typically lose seats in off-year elections, the incumbent Kaufman Government was one of the most popular in recent memory. Over the past two years, the country had seen massive economic growth, which generated increased tax revenue for Kaufman's vast social program expansions, including expanding universal healthcare to include prescription drugs, vision, and dental care along with an expansion of the Patriot Income Dividend for families.
Several commentators suggested that the election could be a referendum on the White House's proposed expansion of the carbon pricing scheme, which was slammed as "authoritarian job-eliminating socialism" by opposition leader and former President Nicole Kim.
On election day, Kaufman's flagship SDP and its allied parties collected nearly 60% of the vote, easily maintaining control of the Senate. Despite a continued drop in Liberal vote share, the SDP's vast gains kept the governing coalition well ahead of its rivals. Repeating previous trends, the National Front gained seats at the expense of the Conservative Union, which would lead to the resignation of CU leader Adam Kinzinger days later. The Senate, while technically beginning their terms on January 3, 2023, would first be convened on February 7, 2023 for President Kaufman's State of the Nation Address.
2022 United States Senate Elections:
Social Democratic (SDP) - 41,377,752 (37.2%) | 50 Senators (+8)
National Front (ANF) - 27,918,859 (25.1%) | 36 Senators (+2)
Conservative Union (CU) - 15,572,272 (14.0%) | 30 Senators (-2)
Liberal Party (ALP) - 13,236,431 (11.9%) | 21 Senators (-9)
Green League (GRN) - 11,123,051 (10.0%) | 11 Senators (+1)
Libertarian Party (LIB) - 2,002,149 (1.8%) | 2 Senators (-)
PAN-LEFT: 65,737,234 (59.1%) - 82 Seats (-)
PAN-RIGHT: 45,493,280 (40.9%) - 68 Seats (-)
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theflyingmgoose
Well-known member
The President-Designate of the United States is a moniker used for someone whose coalition has won an American Federal Election, but who has not been formally elected by the House of Representatives. Because of the fact that parties aren't constitutionally obligated to vote for said candidate, this is distinguished from the office of President-elect, who will assume office no matter what. This distinction was created following the 2000 Election, where a number of disqualifications and hurdles led to the election of George W. Bush as President over Al Gore, despite the narrow victory of Gore's coalition the previous month. The media referring to Gore as President-elect for a month and a half and then not becoming President led to this change.
The office of President-Elect of the United States is a position held by someone who has been formally elected by the House of Representatives, but has not yet assumed office. Unlike the term of the President-Designate, the President-Elect is a legally-recognized position that is entitled to office space, staff, and enhanced security. It's also traditional- though not required- that the outgoing President invite the President-Elect to stay at Blair House- the guest house across from the White House- until their inauguration.
This 100 year-old tradition was broken in 2020, when outgoing President Nicole Kim refused to extend that invitation to President-Elect James Kaufman. Recognizing that not all future Presidents would have the resources to rent a highly-secured DC residence like the multi-millionaire Kaufman, Congress would pass a law in 2022 making this tradition official.
The President of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces along with the absolute leader of the Executive Branch. The President is elected once every four years by the House of Representatives, traditionally by a coalition-based system. The office is more powerful than equivalents not only in parliamentary systems but in presidential systems as well, with the executive having total control over cabinet appointments and requiring 80% of both house of Congress to overturn an executive veto.
FIVE YOUNGEST PRESIDENTS:
1. James M. Kaufman (2021-?), Aged 35 Years, 105 Days
2. Nicole Kim (2017-2021), Aged 36 Years, 91 Days
3. Elizabeth Holtzman (1982-1985), Aged 40 Years, 270 Days
4. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), Aged 42 Years, 322 Days
5. John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), Aged 43 Years, 236 Days
FIVE OLDEST PRESIDENTS:
1. Ronald Reagan (1977-1981, 1985-1989), Aged 73 Years, 349 Days
2. Henry Jackson (1981-1982), Aged 68 Years, 246 Days
3. Ronald Reagan (1977-1981, 1985-1989), Aged 65 Years, 349 Days
4. James Buchanan (1857-1861), Aged 65 Years, 315 Days
5. Zachary Taylor (1841-1841), Aged 64 Years, 100 Days
The "WMD Football" is the device through which the President of the United States accesses the nation's 2,000 warhead strong Nuclear Triad. The system is carried in a large briefcase by a military aid, and is within thirty feet of the President at all times. It is comprised of a lock which requires the President's thumb print and retina scan to open. Inside, it features a codebook full of various military strike options, which can only be activated with the matching codes carried in the "Biscuit", a card which is in the President's pocket at all times. It also includes an advanced satellite-connected video line to the Pentagon, which is required to verify the President's orders. It's rumored that the President can also launch anti-matter weapons from the Football, although this is strenuously denied by the United States Government.
The Football can indeed be used to order an anti-matter strike, although unlike with nuclear launches the verifying officer can veto or delay a launch. In the later case, the Joint Chiefs are assembled and vote on the proposition. It also uses extremely advanced and expensive communications equipment designed to survive cyberattacks and nuclear bombardment, and in the case of fallout carries several dozen suicide pills for the President and his staff.
The United States Anti-Matter Weapons Program is the agency tasked with the research, development, construction, and containment of the country's anti-matter bombs. The program is, for obvious reasons, shrouded in secrecy, although it is estimated to be in control of somewhere between five and ten devices with an estimated yield of roughly 225 Megatons of TNT. Despite the low number of warheads, the program employs roughly 20,000 and costs nearly $50 Billion per year.
The USAMWP actually employs nearly 40,000 people and costs nearly $200 Billion per year, with the funds skimmed from the Sovereign Wealth Fund. It also controls ten B-90 "Devastator" bombs with a yield of nearly 225 megatons and two 11-G "Gnomon" bombs with a yield of 1,000 megatons. The devices are stored nearly three miles underground in rural Texas and are launched with modified "Sea Dragon" rockets.
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- Location
- Western New York
A bit of AH nonsense that just popped into my brain. I have an idea for a longer post on this setting on my Substack, but this is a good teaser - I hope! Next up, a 747-8 flight review from Saigon to Nixon International in Los Angeles.
(Don’t ask how no Watergate - or no Watergate discovery - leads to South Vietnam not collapsing like a soggy house of cards; Nixon, re-elected in a landslide, free of scandal, and thus having no fucks left to give, launches Linebacker III in 1975 and this magically saves the South, which eventually transitions into a stable kinda-sorta democracy? I don't know.)
USS Richard Nixon Carrier Strike Group Visits Republic of Vietnam
19 May 2023
From Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Hannah Chernowski
DA NANG, Republic of Vietnam - The U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Richard Nixon (CVN-77) arrived in Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam, for a scheduled port call May 19, the third time the aircraft carrier has visited the port since 2013.
(Don’t ask how no Watergate - or no Watergate discovery - leads to South Vietnam not collapsing like a soggy house of cards; Nixon, re-elected in a landslide, free of scandal, and thus having no fucks left to give, launches Linebacker III in 1975 and this magically saves the South, which eventually transitions into a stable kinda-sorta democracy? I don't know.)
USS Richard Nixon Carrier Strike Group Visits Republic of Vietnam
19 May 2023
From Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Hannah Chernowski
DA NANG, Republic of Vietnam - The U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Richard Nixon (CVN-77) arrived in Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam, for a scheduled port call May 19, the third time the aircraft carrier has visited the port since 2013.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Maybe add in a dash of China finally getting sick of North Vietnam and trying to invade etc.